Dick Cheney misremembers the Iraq war

In his new memoir, Dick Cheney presents himself as someone who understood that the 9/11 attacks changed the world. Those attacks, he says, made it clear: "We had to do everything possible to be sure they (the terrorists) never got their hands on weapons that could kill millions." That is how he justifies the Iraq war.

It may sound like a plausible rationale. Saddam Hussein clearly aspired to nuclear weapons, and had he gotten them, he might have given them to al-Qaida to use against us. So war was the only way to preempt that possibility.

But it wasn't. Saddam had some liberty to pursue weapons of mass destruction after expelling UN inspectors who might have caught him. What Cheney minimizes is that in December 2002, under pressure from the United States and the world, he allowed them back in.

From that point, it was clear that if Iraq had WMD, he was in danger of their being found -- and in any case, he would be unable to use them or transport them. If he didn't have them, on the other hand, he wouldn't be able to acquire them under the noses of international monitors. Yet Cheney and his boss pressed ahead with their war plans.

It didn't have to be that way. Mohamed ElBaridei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said at the time that within a a few months, the inspectors would be able to refute or verify that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program. But they didn't get those months.

In the end, of course, the Bush administration found it was wrong about the WMD. Given time, the inspectors could have told them that. They could also have saved the United States from a catastrophic war -- one for which much of the blame lies on Cheney.